The Real Adventure eBook

“Oh, perhaps,” said Portia indifferently.
“I wouldn’t worry about that, though.
Because really, child, you had no more chance of growing
up to be a lawyer and a leader of the ‘Cause’
than I have of getting to be a brigadier-general.”

Rose stopped brushing her hair and demanded to be
told why not. She had been getting on all right
up to now, hadn’t she?

“Why, just think,” said Portia, “what
mother herself had gone through when she was your
age; put herself through college because her father
didn’t believe in ’higher education’—­practically
disowned her. She’d taught six months in
that awful school—­remember?—­she
was used to being abused and ridiculed. And she
was working hard enough to have killed a camel.
But you!... Why, Lamb, you’ve never really
had to do anything in your life. If you
felt like it, all right—­and equally all
right if you didn’t. You’ve never
been hurt—­never even been frightened.
You wouldn’t know what they felt like.
And the result is ...”

Portia drew in a long puff, then eyed her cigarette
thoughtfully through the slowly expelled smoke.
“The result is,” she concluded, “that
you have grown up into a big, splendid, fearless,
confiding creature that it’s perfectly inevitable
some man like Rodney Aldrich would go straight out
of his head about. And there you are.”

A troubled questioning look came into the younger
sister’s eyes. “I’ve been lazy
and selfish, I know,” she said. “Perhaps
more than I thought. I haven’t meant to
be. But ... Do you think I’m any good
at all?”

“That’s the real injustice of it,”
said Portia; “that you are. You’ve
stayed big and simple. It couldn’t possibly
occur to you now to say to yourself, ’Poor old
Portia! She’s always been jealous because
mother liked me best, and now she’s just green
with envy because I’m going to marry Rodney
Aldrich.’”

She wouldn’t stop to hear Rose’s protest.
“I know it couldn’t,” she went on.
“That’s what I say. And yet there’s
more than a little truth in it, I suppose. Oh,
I don’t mean I’m sorry you’re going
to be happy—­I believe you are, you know.
I’m just a little sorry for myself. Curious,
anyway, to see where I’ve missed all the big
important things you’ve kept. I’ve
been afraid of my instincts, I suppose. Never
able to take a leap because I’ve always stopped
to look, first. I’m too narrow between
the cheek-bones, perhaps. Anyhow, here I stay,
grinding along, wondering what it’s all about
and what after all’s the use.... While you,
you baby! are going to find out.”

What Rose wanted to do was to gather her sister up
in her arms and kiss her. But the faint ironic
smile on Portia’s fine lips, the twist of her
eyebrows, the poise of her body as she sat up in bed
watching the blue-brown smoke rising in a straight
thin line from her diminishing cigarette, combined
to make such a demonstration altogether impossible.

“Mother thinks, I guess,” she said, to
break the silence, “that I ought to have looked
a little longer. She thinks Rodney would have
‘wanted’ me more, if I hadn’t thrown
myself at him like that.”